La Grange claims innocence

STEINHOFF: ‘THERE WAS LIMITED SHARING OF INFORMATION FROM CEO MARCUS JOOSTE’

In December 2017, Deloitte asked for comment from company on report.

Steinhoff’s former CFO Ben la Grange absolved himself of responsibility in the group’s fraud and irregularities and said there was a “limited sharing of information from Mr Jooste [former CEO Markus Jooste] to myself”.

Speaking at a parliamentary portfolio committee meeting, he also said he did not believe that former chairman Christo Wiese or audit committee chair Steve Booysen knew about the fraud being committed.

He divided what went wrong into three “buckets”:

Firstly, profits were inflated. The main source of inflated profits was from what he was led to believe was an external buying group, which paid additional rebates to operating entities, which recorded a profit.

“The buying group appears to be nonexistent and funded by loans from Steinhoff,” he said. These contributions flowed into all divisions, with the bulk being in Europe.

Secondly, there were transactions where assets were acquired at inflated values.

Thirdly, there were a number of transactions where La Grange thought the parties Steinhoff was dealing with were valid third parties, but in fact they were related to or influenced by Jooste.

His testimony before the committee was welcomed by chair Yunus Carrim, who effectively told Steinhoff chair Heather Sonn to stop talking as Steinhoff had provided parliament with no substantial information since being summoned for the first time in January and for essentially obfuscating, “wriggling” and engaging in a PR exercise and “not fully appreciating the gravity of what is happening here”.

According to La Grange, he only became aware that something was wrong on the weekend of December 2, 2017, when – for the first time – Steinhoff was given a report by auditor Deloitte flagging issues and asking for comment.

La Grange told Deloitte that they needed to wait for the CEO, who was en route to South Africa, to comment. “He landed on the Monday morning and never showed up for the audit committee meeting,” La Grange said.

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